Modern and Contemporary

The Petrified Forest Project
Rhonda Rider
Ravello Records RR8103 (ravellorecords.com/catalog/rr8103)

Cellist Rhonda Rider is no stranger to playing in interesting locations, having been Artist-in-Residence previously at the Grand Canyon in 2011, and later at the Petrified Forest National Park in 2015. As cello professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, she brings her vast experiences with classical and contemporary performance, enabling her to explore these newly commissioned compositions with skill and ease. The connection to the beautiful surroundings is clearly evident throughout the album, as Rider pairs the compositions with each setting that inspired them, in this 200-million-year-old ecosystem.

The album opens with Raven Chacon’s Invisible Arc, inspired by a traditional Navajo hunting song, and Laurie San Martin’s Vast steppe, based on Gregorian Chant, which includes changing the cello’s tuning and some improvisations juxtaposing old and new, as does the park itself. Kurt Rohde’s credo petrified for amplified cello is a beautiful lamenting conversation that considers “the unadorned ritual of forgotten deaths… dying its own gradual death at a glacial pace becoming sonic dust.” Pari is a four-movement suite by Mischa Salkind-Pearl that takes its movement titles from flora native to the park; a delicate composition sketching the thriving nature of these seeds in such a dry area. 

The theme of old and new continues with Verklärtes Holz (Transfigured Wood). Beginning with the title, a reference to Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, it illustrates the parallels between natural and artificial processes of transformation: the petrified wood beginning as living redwoods, swept away by floods, buried and mineralized; vs wood over time becoming a cello, a picturesque description in three movements and a fitting addition to an album both based on wood and performed on wood. The album ends with Ian Gottleib’s Meditation on Impatience, and Rider passionately portrays the colourful, cinematic exploration of layers of sediment in the forest’s Badlands of this truly ancient ecological wonder.

Wings – Chamber Music by Rami Levin
Various Artists
Acis APL53875 (acisproductions.com/wings-chamber-music-by-rami-levin)

Rami Levin (b.Brooklyn 1954) composed five of this CD’s works while living in Brazil (2010-2017). The two sprightly movements of Asar (Wings) for clarinet, violin and piano utilize bird calls “heard constantly outside my window.” The soulful Saudade (Longing) for guitar follows. Reflections of Reflections (11.11.11) for wind quintet matches the numerical uniqueness of November 11, 2011 with drily mathematical music – 11 sections, each 11 measures. Caprichosa (Capricious) for flute and harp is more engaging, songful and rhythmically “capricious.”

Três Cançöes (Three Songs), commissioned by Brazilian soprano Veruschka Mainhard, set poems by Mainhard’s then-seven-year-old daughter Laura. The texts of Os Macacos Brincalhöes (The Playful Monkeys), O Pequeno Barco (The Little Boat) and Porco (Pigs) are delightfully imaginative and charming, as is the music, charmingly performed by bright-voiced soprano Alisa Jordheim and pianist Kuang-Hao Huang. Jordheim, accompanied by flute, harp and guitar, also sings Four English Songs (1997), light-hearted settings of the nursery rhymes Sixpence, Apple Pie, Hey Diddle Diddle and The House that Jack Built.

In Linguas Fraternas (Fraternal Languages) for viola and piano (2019), Levin drew upon her experiences teaching ESL in Brazil. Leste-Oeste (East-West) juxtaposes Afghani elements on the viola with American blues on the piano; in Norte-Sul (North-South), the instruments play in different rhythms, “a musical representation,” writes Levin, “of different ways of saying the same things…The piece is an homage to the beauty and richness of language and the experience of merging different cultures.”

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Vigil
Ethel & Layale Chaker
In A Circle Records ICR030 (ethelcentral.bandcamp.com/album/vigil-icr030)

Radio Afloat
Layale Chaker & Sarafand
In A Circle Records ICR031 (layalechaker.bandcamp.com/album/radio-afloat-icr031)

For violinist Layale Chaker, the trigger for her composition Vigil, performed with the ensemble ETHEL, was the revolution in Lebanon. The work, however, takes its inspiration from the poem What They Did Yesterday Afternoon by the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. As the liner notes tell us, the poem “sketches, with startling economy, a world torn by a cascading series of problems…” 

Chaker’s musical lines are closely aligned with the rhythm of the “world torn” and their dark tones and textures reflect the density of this “cascading.” Like the writer, she too visualises the fabric of humanity like expensive raw silk. This is reflected in the harmonic overtones that enrich the stark narratives of each of the movements of Vigil, building up to an almost frenzied crescendo in the fifth, and final episode of the tone poem. 

The members of ETHEL also contribute a piece each to this recording that describes a world in the thrall of a dark, existential angst. Chaker and the members of ETHEL employ an inspired understanding of Phrygian modes that inform Andalusi literature using a strophic form called qasida and maqama which Chaker brilliantly transforms into phrases made of ephemeral, almost ghostly glissandi that turns her into a kind of shamanic alchemist, enabling her to send audiences into emotional states that border on both the mystical and the magical. This (inspired use of maqama in her art) spells the true genius of Chaker’s musicianship. It is also what makes this recordingirresistibly hypnotic. 

If you listen to Chaker’s next recording Radio Afloat, fairly soon after you’ve listened to Vigil and you sense more pain in the works therein, you would be absolutely right. But consider this. The city of Beirut, (capital of her birth-country Lebanon), was once called the “Paris of the Middle East.” It was the proverbial city of light, so alive with joie de vivre that the sun never seemed to set on its citizenry. But internecine wars precipitated by religious strife, the greed of those who held positions of power and the residual effects of colonialism spelled the city’s (and country’s) doom.

The feeling of loss, of the sharp pain of having to leave behind what you love and emigrate elsewhere, will never leave a person who had experienced the kind of paradise that Beirut once was. This sense of loss is what burns with a slow blue flame throughout Radio Afloat. 

The music is played here by Chaker and the ensemble Sarafand, which comprises a cello, contrabass, piano, microtonal keyboard and a drum set that includes Lebanese frame drums. It also features Chaker’s vocals, characterised by ululating, high and lonesome wailing. Radio Afloat is an eight-movement suite which, as Chaker tells us, is woven into, and echoes, The Trace of Blue Passion, a poem by the Lebanese writer Ounsi el-Hage. 

The Trace of Blue Passion is a glorious lament in which the poet informs us: “After we witnessed the extent of bird’s wisdom / I remind you that it is in the nature of creatures / to harm themselves.” Like the poet, Chaker and the performers of Sarafand match the poem’s lyricism with profound musical beauty and classical pathos.

Cello Unlocked
Bryan Hayslett
Neuma 132 (bryanhayslett.bandcamp.com/album/cello-unlocked)

Feeling almost carved from the ground up, this album is full of interesting and innovative dialogues. Not only is it beautifully played, the pieces come to you as transcriptions of voices and stories through the cello and voice of Hayslett without affect or personal interference. 

There is a genuineness throughout the album which is refreshing. Vocals are raw and focus on the works, the poetry and the stories they tell. Haylsett’s performances are deeply interpretive, which is not necessarily the same as improvised, and he draws on fascinating academic research for his book The Theory of Prominence, where he discusses rhythm of music in relation to language. Throughout the album he illustrates this theory with his connection of the cello to the human voice. Beginning with Caroline Shaw’s in manus tuas, based on Christ’s final words on the cross it begins with a deep grittiness on the cello, where we first hear the voice intoning notes. Mary Kouyoumdjian’s and there was is an absolutely stunning working of a text rich with grief and loss, a full dialogue between cello and voice. Joan La Barbara’s with the years is a commanding work with text from a poem by Dorothea Tanning seen on the NYC subway. It is beautifully interpreted, from the delicate harmonic opening to the double-stopped vocal lines.  

The middle anchor of the album is Unlocked by Judith Weir, a work in five movements based on the John and Alan Lomax 1930s recordings of folk songs collected from Black prisoners in the American south. These are a range of direct transcriptions of whispers to blues, giving voice to prisoners otherwise unheard. Tonadas, Germán Marano’s gentle arrangement of two milking songs, is followed by recovering (speech rhythm study 1), a transcription from an original poem virtually matched on the cello. The album closes with Brent Michael David’s Cello Chili, a recipe for a pot of chili stirred with cello parts, a fun but also fascinating blend of speech and music.

Listen to 'Cello Unlocked' Now in the Listening Room